Within the Margin

There are a fair number of high-information Democrats who rank Richard Lugar as their “favorite Republican senator”  – not simply President Obama, who was purported to think as much (though he’s never said it in so many words) in attack advertisements this primary season condemning Lugar for straying from the right’s preferred path. Note that this approval among some Democrats is not because he has a liberal voting record. Far from it. Lugar is a down-the-line social and fiscal conservative. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon called this guy his favorite mayor, and he hasn’t veered much from the conservative orthodoxy that Nixon appreciated then. His only real breaks from the party line comes on matters of foreign policy, where he strives for a bipartisan (or nonpartisan) consensus in how the United States makes itself and the world a safer place. For decades, he has worked with Democrats on the issue of nuclear weapon proliferation. This doesn’t mean he’s a peacenik or an isolationist – it means he takes a lofty view of government’s effectiveness, at least in one area of policymaking, and acts in good faith to make that view a reality. He has also co-sponsored the DREAM Act – anathema to many conservatives who take a hard line on illegal immigration, but in keeping with Lugar’s pragmatist persona in matters of international relations.

Savvier Democrats appreciate Lugar more than someone like Olympia Snowe, who gets lots of play in the national media for being some kind of moderate but ultimately offers only occasionally-liberal views on some social issues and a history of head-fakes toward compromise – the negotiations over the Affordable Care Act come to mind – followed by retreat when her conference turned up the heat. After repeated disappointments, it would be a stretch to call Senator Snowe a good-faith operator, and that’s exactly why Lugar has his fans on the other side of the aisle. He doesn’t string people along to gain editorial credence as some kind of mythical, throwback centrist: he plays it straight, bringing an informed, intellectual rigor to America’s dealings with other nations.

And let’s not forget the basis of that “Obama’s favorite Republican” idea. It’s not strictly borne out of Lugar’s work during the Obama presidency; its genesis is in their time together in the Senate, when they worked together on arms reduction. Obama was a freshman senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Lugar was the old hand who in the 1990s had collaborated with Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn on the Nunn-Lugar program, which brought about the cooperative dismantling and destruction of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in former Soviet states. Obama and Lugar would co-author further arms reduction legislation during their time together in the Senate. In other words, the Obama-Lugar connection stems from an effort to control and reduce destructive weapons around the globe. They wanted to reduce the deadly variables threatening international security: the unaccounted-for weapons that could fall into dangerous hands. Today, by a 60%-40% margin, Republican primary voters in Indiana decided that national security was a less noble goal than the continued purge of the Republican party not simply of moderates or occasional conservative apostates, but of those who can work with a president of the other party.

To be sure, there are other reasons why Lugar went down today. His focus on international matters leaves less room to focus on parochial issues, and voters in a representative democracy have a right to focus on Indiana if they want to. Lugar did himself no favors by staying in hotels when he returned to Indiana, and using a house he had long ago sold as his voting address for many years. Lugar’s Tea Party-backed opponent, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, attacked the incumbent for his literal and figurative distance from Indiana.

But at the end of the day, Lugar has seen his popularity among Republicans plummet since his last election bid, at a time when Republicans seem blinded by a hatred for Obama that makes it unacceptable for a co-partisan to have a function relationship with the man. And now, to the tune of a 60%-40% drubbing, Indiana Republicans have cast aside their conference’s most knowledgeable and productive foreign policy mind. For my money, there is nothing that better summarizes the last four years in Republican politics.